What rules the behaviour of human beings? Our needs, as materialist and utilitarian thinkers believe? Our intellect and the dictates of reason, as Platonists and Hegelians hope? Or do we obey our...
On 6 October 1981, President Anwar al-Sadat attended a parade to mark the anniversary of the crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 war with Israel. It was also an occasion to display the...
Four young Muslim men with Yorkshire accents are taking turns to address the camera in front of a sagging cloth backdrop. ‘Eh up, you unbelieving kuffar bastards,’ one of them begins....
This is one of Christopher Black’s verdicts on the work of the Roman Inquisition: The human casualties among major thinkers were fewer than might have been expected; Bruno might have been...
During the first months of this year, the embers of a long running legal controversy have reignited in the United States. ‘Of all the issues,’ Rahm Emanuel was told by the senior...
Watched from a safe distance, Arthur Koestler’s life was like a Catherine-wheel breaking free from its stake. Leaping and spinning and scattering crowds, emitting fountains of alarming...
No casualty of recent wars has been mourned more keenly than the concept of international law. By the summer of 2001, so its standard bearers believed, international law had largely achieved its...
According to the Los Angeles Times, people may have ‘a basic setting on their happiness thermostat’. So don’t blame your current depression on your ex-wife, your sullen...
The village of Shrewton lies in the valley of the River Till, overshadowed by chalk escarpments, about four miles from Stonehenge. One of my ancestors, Charles Light, was the pastor of the Zion...
Can a political leader be a saint? Private morality can’t be the sole criterion. Politicians have to make decisions in a cruel and perplexing world, and some consequences of even the best...
Eamon Duffy, whose opinion of this book will not be lightly disputed, remarks on its jacket that ‘everyone who reads it will learn things they didn’t know.’ Most lay reviewers...
I’ve been thinking all week about Jon Venables. In some way, I find it too distressing to write down what the case means to me, when so many people believe the young man is simply a lost...
In January 1999, Colin Middleton hanged himself in prison. He’d been in custody since 1982, when he was convicted – aged 14 – of murdering his 18-month-old niece. While in...
Lucian of Samosata, nicknamed ‘blasphemer’ or ‘slanderer’ – better, in fact, to call him ‘atheist’, because in his dialogues he went so far as to...
At some time in the past the idea took hold that social justice was all about the state’s hoovering up resources and then blowing them at needy or deserving recipients. Some of these...
There is a certain kind of Jewish joke that doesn’t end, but peters out in a shoulder-shrugging way, as if to say: ‘You thought this was going to be a joke?’ I’ll spare...
Ever since the rise of Margaret Thatcher, personal responsibility has been the irresistible itch that the Conservative Party dare not scratch – at least not in public. Notwithstanding the...
In the early 1980s, Ismail Merchant set out to make The Deceivers. He was without his usual collaborator, James Ivory, who was not enthusiastic about the project. The film eventually appeared in...